


Life in Factorials

by Souja



Series: Crossposts [2]
Category: BIRDMEN - 田辺イエロウ | Tanabe Yellow
Genre: Gen, Thought Barf, crossposted, it was there when i pressed send but i guess it went awol, oh well, you know i have no clue what happened to my tags or summary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-03-23 18:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13793844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Souja/pseuds/Souja
Summary: Life and times of an EDEN clone





	Life in Factorials

Six.

 

EDEN life is having subjects and patients that have been around longer than the people experimenting on them. 

It’s young Eve’s and Adam’s hearing stories about wise men and beautiful flowers, their predecessors, their comrades. 

It's the bells of childish laughter while the elders shuffle in discomfort. The rapid fire indoctrination to the science that makes up the air they breathe. Being instructed to deliver medicine on strict timelines, tiny hands holding entire projects in the balance. 

The world is made of steel walls and familiar faces. The Earth outside is as bountiful as it is forbidden. Midnight conspiracies whisper about the outside world while storybooks are traded out for textbooks with growing frequency. 

It’s watching older clones being carted away while whispers consider it a blessing that, well, they at least made it to 23. The begrudging acceptance after it happens ten, twenty, times that this must be life and life is short. 

(it is a lie in the truest sense. a cruel, cruel, mercy)

 

Twelve.

 

Partitioning pills under the guidance of older clones. Individuality dwells in the cutting of hair and the day a new name is chosen. 

Flowers are perennials. The heroes have legacies. Romance lives in the strings of their DNA. 

Lab work is done with pride in frosty laboratories. The chill is commonplace--it will not leave. Rumor has it that it's the dead clones saying hello. They're a mischievous sort, their mischief benign. Do not mind them. 

Now the faces twist as they pass by. They are hated by the subjects herded between lab and lab, despised by personnel with graying hair--there was more to that thought, but focus demands attention more than defining metaphorical daggers. The lab coat is a shield more than a cape, and it will protect from the malice they can never quite shake off. 

Like the chill, the days pass and are peppered with spiteful comment about outliving them--  some subjects are 30, others an enviable 60. They’ve seen clones come and go.

Nightfall brings the sudden realisation that  _time_  is moving, moving, moving. The crushing dawn this-- _all of this--_ is ephemeral.  _Temporary._

The correct term is a midlife crisis. 

 

Eighteen.

 

Spite grows alongside them. It blooms as beauty flourishes and dreams wither beneath winters of unfinished works. A morbid trend exists in the form of hourglass necklaces--to count down the hours that readily slip away.

A hidden vent in the research lab holds diaries. It is an effigy to life, the single most known secret. 

These are the things of importance. The lab notes, the inside jokes, the harried thoughts and scribbled anxieties. These persist long after the body is cremated and the ash scattered. 

No greater love had a clone than to give research notes to another. In this way the legacy persists. But do not share names. 

Do not. 

 

Twenty-four. 

 

Is a miracle. 

The lucky few are exiled like nomads. Or maybe like prodigals.

Perhaps. 

Life continues for the others, though.

The brain is a tool. The body is a machine. 

When the machine breaks it is disposed of and replaced. They hold a burial for it, with paper flowers and pretty, white clothing. The ashes are shunted far, far away. 

In labs the replacements are doing dances of cognitive dissonance even as the syringe is prepared. They are overwriting hurt with the information they're given.  

The children smile at their elders, the withered flowers and the dead heroes, and they do not know any better. 

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted from tumblr


End file.
